Like a Sail in a Storm
by junnir
Summary: Post-Season 2 finale. / In which Hunter thinks he's stronger than this, and Bobbi realizes what matters most. Two-shot.
1. (Hunter)

He opens his eyes when he hears a soft grunt coming from beside him. It's her, and she's just emerged from a painkiller-induced nap, and her eyes are filled with perplexity and bewilderment. He leans in towards her, and her hand – safely in his firm grasp – tightens around his.

"Bob," he greets softly. She's still a little out of it, so he's doing his best not to push her into responding. "It's alright, Bob, I'm here."

He can see the slight motions of her head, and it doesn't take him long to realize that she was shaking her head. "What's wrong? Do you need Simmons?"

Her lips part just a little. "Nightmare," she breathes.

He frowns and presses his lip against her forehead, as gently as possible. "You're okay now, love. There's no need to be scared. I'm here; you can dream of me instead." He lets a cheeky grin ghost over his lips.

" _You_ ," she looks into his eyes, "were having one."

His expression falters and he leans back away from her. Almost instinctively, he felt her hand tighten around his again. "Hunter," she tries again.

He forces a smile at her. "I'm fine, Bob." When she doesn't look convinced (she rarely does, by him), he nods a few times. "Really."

/

Truth be told, it wasn't the first time she caught him having a nightmare. The first time was a few days ago, when he _insisted_ on staying by her bedside (he'd been rooted to that chair ever since the very first day, Simmons once told Bobbi), and she woke up to find his head resting on one arm, but with eyes shifting from left to right (she could see the unrest beneath his eyelids), and with slight movements of his lips.

It took her a bit of concentration, but she could hear his frantic whispers, commanding whoever it was to get away from her. She was lying in a bed in a makeshift hospital ward at the base, so clearly whatever it was that was happening in his head, it was about that little kidnapping incident she had gotten herself into a while ago.

Simmons entered the ward at that very moment, busy with her tablet. Bobbi called out for her, praying quietly that the busy scientist would hear her. She did, and came approaching close. Bobbi jabs her head slightly in Hunter's direction, and Simmons finally notices the nightmare-experiencing man. There is a fleeting look of pity that manifests on Simmons' face, and she manages to get rid of it before waking Hunter up from his very restless sleep.

Hunter flinches, opens his eyes, and sees the two ladies looking at him with worried gazes. He brushes it off with a small grin and starts asking Bobbi if she felt alright.

That was the first time he realized that he was letting it show.

Letting his fears and troubles out into the open. He was never like this.

And if Bobbi could help it, she would've gotten up and pulled him into her arms, wrapping them tight around him while assuring him that she was fine.

/

He splashes water on his face and lets the cooling effect take over. He needed this to clear his mind, except it didn't really help. It made him more awake, sure, but now he was even more aware, too.

He doesn't move for a while, lets his eyes wander around the space in front of him. Bobbi needs him. Bobbi just came out of a harrowing ordeal. Bobbi was the one lying in a bed in a makeshift hospital ward. Bobbi is suffering, still on her way to recuperating completely.

And _he_ was the one with the nightmares, crumbling under the pressure?

He so desperately wanted to give himself a beating. He didn't think he had the right to be there for her if he was going to be the weak one in all of this.

He swallows down the lump in his throat and steels himself up, then turns to leave the restroom – only to find Fitz standing in the doorway, leaning against the doorframe with folded arms. To Fitz's credit, though, he was the first person who didn't look at Hunter with that worried expression and the anxious eyes. Hunter hated it when everybody looked at _him_ with that face, when they should be looking at Bobbi with that face instead—

"It's perfectly fine, you know," Fitz says, not even flinching when Hunter's eyes shoot towards him.

"What is?" Hunter has half the mind to push past Fitz to leave, but he couldn't do that to a friend.

Fitz raises a hand and gesticulates slightly at him. "The nightmares," he whispers. "Jemma told me."

Hunter licks his lips and looks away. "I'm fine, Fitz."

When it seems like Hunter was about to flee the conversation, Fitz moves to block him from the door. "You're trying to be."

"Everybody's trying," Hunter responds.

"Exactly. But for you," he shifts closer to his friend, "you won't be, not until you—"

"—stop having these nightmares? Stop being the weak one in this entire equation? Stop being the one that Bobbi can't lean on when she needs to lean on someone the most right now?"

Both of them fall silent for a while. The tensions were high and so were the stakes. Hunter using his raised voice couldn't mean well.

The first one to speak up again is, surprisingly, Fitz. And Hunter listens.

"Not until you accept that it's okay to hurt."

Fitz puts a hand on Hunter's shoulder. "You watched her get shot in front of you, Hunter." He leans closer to him. "I know what you're doing, but pretending to be strong doesn't make you strong. There's going to be a moment of weakness before you find that strength."

He feels something loosen and snap within his system when Fitz squeezes his shoulder. Then there's a sob.

"Bobbi got hurt," Hunter chokes out, "because of me."

/

When Bobbi wakes up again, Hunter is looking at her with clear eyes, and her hand is enclosed tightly in both of his.

He holds her hand up to his lips and presses it against them gently.

"I've been having nightmares," he admits softly.

She smiles at him before pulling him down slowly for a kiss.

"I know," she whispers.

Hunter has been through more than enough to know that fears were overrated. Sometimes you just had to forgo the cognitive process and just jump right in. Fear what? Fear not, or you'll never get the job done.

But watching her throw herself, chains and chair and all, in the line of fire, and watching that bullet pierce through her skin and burst out dangerously close to where he used to put his ear to listen to her heartbeat, he felt the fear in its rawest form.

And now every time he closes his eyes, he sees it happen again. And again. And again, and again, and he doesn't know if it'll ever stop.

But if he opens his eyes and sees her face first thing enough times, he thinks he'll get better.

After all, he's not scared of death, but he sure is scared of losing her.


	2. (Bobbi)

She opens her eyes when she hears the soft snores coming from him. It's been long since she heard him rest this peacefully next to her, so she decides not to wake him, and just turns her head a few degrees towards him, so she could just watch.

Her job really wasn't one designed for the slow and steady. She couldn't remember the last time she slowed down her pace just to appreciate everything—and everyone—around her. Lying here in a bed now, weakened and tattered, was apparently the only way she could appreciate his closed eyes and slightly furrowed brows, tracing out the lines on his face and the outline of his jaw.

She counts along with the quiet beeping of all the machines hooked up to her. Any moment now, and—

The furrow in his brows deepen. Soon his lips part by just the slightest of inches and she can hear him murmuring. It's frantic and panicked and he just sounds so _scared_.

She tries to shift her hand a little closer towards his. It hurt like _hell_ – most of every part of her did – but she still tried. She had to reach him.

And when she did, she takes his hand into hers and gives it a gentle squeeze.

It's enough to get him to jump out of his slumber and lean in closer to her, the worry pouring out of his eyes onto her. "Bob? You alright? Do you need—"

"I don't need Simmons," she smiles, already finishing his sentence in her head. "And I feel fine."

"Are you—"

"Yes, I'm _sure_." She squeezes his hand again. "I've been feeling fine for days. As for you, though…"

"I'm not going back to my room," he replies, as firmly as ever. "At least, not until you're coming with me."

With one last trademark grin at her, he leans back into his seat to further cement his point. He's not going to go anywhere.

And she can't find it within herself to object to that. "Fine, idiot."

/

As of late, it seems like the only thing that can get him to come out of those hellish nightmares he's been having is her. She wakes much more easily now that the drugs have worn off, and she's always been a light sleeper. It doesn't take much for her to notice that he's going through whatever she went through, again and again in his head, in his sleep.

She does him a favor by squeezing his hand to let him know she's fine. Now if only he will stop thinking otherwise…

Sometimes, while she's watching him fidget and shift in his seat, furrowed brows working themselves and lips muttering to 'get away from her', she's also busy wondering if there's a way to get inside his head. She's busy wondering if there's a way she could speed up her recovery so she could sit up in her bed and pull him into her arms for an embrace that would surely convince him that she's fine now.

Sometimes, while she's busy focusing on the way his eyes look at her, she sees that there's a lot in his dark brown eyes that spoke volumes, which his words didn't convey. And she wonders if there'll ever be a day when he would breach the subject with her again, to question her just _why the hell_ she decided to take that _goddamned_ bullet.

And when that happens, she thinks, all she wants to do is to hold him close and whisper in his ear that she'd do it all over again.

There are many things they don't know. They don't know how the future will be like, they don't know if she'll ever go back to being Mockingbird, they don't know when—or if—they will ever forget what happened. But there's one thing Bobbi knows and that's the very fact that she'll take that bullet again if she had to.

Love, Hunter once said, made her stupid. It made her brave, she counters; but it made her stupid too, and his voice cracks.

/

Simmons sits by her bed, tapping away at her tablet. The beeping rouses Bobbi from her slumber, and soon she's shifting to look at the busy scientist.

"Hey there," Bobbi greets.

Simmons flinches when she notices that Bobbi is up. "Oh no, did I wake you up? I'm terribly sorry."

"Come on, you know full well I've slept more than enough." It takes her a second to register that Hunter wasn't around. "Where's…"

"He's, um, he's washing up in the restroom. Do you need him? I can go get him for you—"

Bobbi smiles. "No, it's okay. But do me a favor," she leans in closer to the scientist and looks directly into her eyes, as a means to further stress her message across to her, "please— _please_ —get him to go back to his room."

The helpless smile from Simmons tells Bobbi enough. "Then it'll be the millionth time we've tried," she says. "He's worried about you, is all."

Bobbi shakes her head, suppressing a sigh. "He needs proper rest, too."

She watches Simmons' shoulders ease as she shoves her tablet away to the side. It's the only indicator she needs to tell that the younger girl was about to have a personal conversation with her. Not her strong suit, unfortunately.

Simmons chews on her lower lip a little. Bobbi nudges her clasped hands with her elbow, as best as she could considering how wrecked her arm was at the moment. "You have something you want to talk about?"

"It's just… I mean, I've just been… Wondering," she stammers.

"What about?"

"About why you did… What you did out there."

It triggers a bout of flashbacks to everything she saw and felt on that one very bad day. Then again, Bobbi didn't need much of a reminder for the flashbacks – it's hard to _need_ a reminder when the scenes play out repeatedly in her head every time she closes her eyes.

This was Barbara Morse they were talking about. She didn't chalk up all those years of experience and expertise just to succumb to what those two put her through.

But it was at that instance when she felt it.

"It's ironic, really," she replies, a small wistful smile emerging on her countenance.

 _Fear._

"Hunter told me a while ago that love made me stupid. That I was stupid for doing what I did. You know what I told him?" She chuckles, but it sounds a little flat and mirthless and it doesn't reach her insides. And Simmons could tell as much. "I told him I was brave."

"You _were_ ," the scientist reaffirms.

"I guess that's one way to look at it." Bobbi was never a fan of the lump in the throat, the tears threatening to spill forth and all that crap. "But like I said," and her voice quivers, "it's ironic."

She looks straight into Simmons' eyes, and the latter knew this was one of the handful of moments _the_ Mockingbird ever let vulnerability into her system.

"I said I was brave, but I did it out of fear." Then one drop rolls down the side of her face.

"When you finally start to understand that only one of you would walk out alive, the fear takes over all rationale and logic, shuts your senses down, and makes you do things you might never otherwise do."

And another drop rolls down. She smiles, despite. "It's the fear of losing the other person."

"You have no regrets," Simmons' question came out as a statement instead.

"And I'd do it all over again," and Bobbi's voice cracks.

/

Bobbi watches Simmons talk to Fitz outside her makeshift ward. She notices the way Simmons has her hands hovering near Fitz's and doesn't even make to hide the smile.

Hunter leans in nearer to her, having finished rambling about his very eventful day (which he spent next to her bed, in a chair, again, as usual). "What are you looking at?"

Bobbi doesn't answer him. She looks away from the two young ones outside, and lets her eyes wander around the room. When her eyes finally land on him, she can't put into words how glad she was to see his brown eyes mirroring hers.

Sure she's glad to be alive, but to see him right next to her safe and sound, that's a whole other thing.

"Hunter."

He slips his fingers through the gaps between her mostly recovered ones. (That's where it feels most right.)

"I'd do it all over again."

There are no words for this, so he just kisses her and lets everything else fade into the background.

/

Maybe there will come a day in the future when she'd tell him about her worst fears. Or maybe not; she was hard-wired to keep mum about a lot of things, after all.

But this was him, and this was the very same person she didn't shun away from death for. He deserves a bit of honesty, doesn't he?

Yes, he does. But honesty wasn't her strong suit. She'll do it in baby steps. So perhaps she'll start with being honest about how much she hates his sarcastic, quippy little ass.

Tomorrow she'll tell him how much she loves to hate him.

Next week she'll tell him how much she loves _him_.

Then, maybe someday, she'll tell him that she's not scared of death, but she sure was scared of losing him.

(She reckons he already knows.)


End file.
